Polaroid’s Anti-AI Ads Cover Up a Dark Secret

Recently, Creative Bloq published an article about how Polaroid is taking a stab at AI. They’re doing this with several printed billboard campaigns in big cities. “Taking a stand against over-digitisation, Polaroid’s campaign centres around a large billboard situated on Coney Island beach, reading ‘Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up’.” the article states. “With its handwritten-style font and candid Polaroid snap, the design has a signature human warmth that counteracts its subtly foreboding message.” Yet the article also really covers up how Polaroid has directly assisted with the robbery of a photographer’s rights.

If you’ve been a long-time reader of the Phoblographer, you’re probably aware of Unsplash. They’re a brand that we’ve been covering for a very long time; yet YouTubers and other journalistic photography websites haven’t covered them or worked to cry out against what they’re doing.

Essentially, for years they’ve been running the Unsplash awards. These awards basically ask photographers to give up their images to be added to their platform. Once uploaded, the images are license free, free for commercial use, and don’t even need to be attributed to anyone. I’ve called out websites and services that use it in the past. Sites like Shutterbug, which are supposed to be tailored to photographers, even did it once — that we can find.

The Unsplash Awards are judged by people representing very big companies. Peak Design, Polaroid, Elle, National Geographic, and others have been a part of this. In the past, we’ve even called Nikon out on using Unsplash. Leica UK was also famously part of it.

And last year, everything we’ve talked about and warned photographers about came true. Getty bought Unsplash. Then they sold it to Midjourney, and none of the photographers got compensated.

Now let’s bring this back to Polaroid.

When we first started seeing that Polaroid was a part of Unsplash, the Phoblographer stopped working Polaroid out of ethical reasons. In fact, in our 2023 review of the I2, we stated that we’d spoken to Polaroid reps and they condemned the actions of that rep. So after that, they passed our ethics test. Ethics are something we take very seriously and we often incorporate two whole sections of it into our product reviews.

But now, Polaroid is doing it again. They’re part of the 2025 Unsplash awards, which is still owned by Midjourney. So essentially, photographers are feeding AI.

Crazy: Polaroid says that the data centers are going to use up all the water; but they work with a company that is using all the water?